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That Life, the various, the all-including, the primal and
one, who can consider it without longing to be of it, disdaining
all the other?
All other life is darkness, petty and dim and poor; it is unclean
and polluting the clean for if you do but look upon it you no
longer see nor live this life which includes all living, in which
there is nothing that does not live and live in a life of purity
void of all that is ill. For evil is here where life is in copy
and Intellect in copy; There is the archetype, that which is good
in the very Idea- we read- as holding The Good in the pure Idea.
That Archetype is good; Intellectual-Principle is good as holding
its life by contemplation of the archetype; and it sees also as
good the objects of its contemplation because it holds them in
its act of contemplating the Principle of Good. But these objects
come to it not as they are There but in accord with its own
condition, for it is their source; they spring thence to be here,
and Intellectual-Principle it is that has produced them by its
vision There. In the very law, never, looking to That, could it
fail of Intellectual Act; never, on the other hand, could it
produce what is There; of itself it could not produce; Thence it
must draw its power to bring forth, to teem with offspring of
itself; from the Good it takes what itself did not possess. From
that Unity came multiplicity to Intellectual-Principle; it could
not sustain the power poured upon it and therefore broke it up;
it turned that one power into variety so as to carry it
piecemeal.
All its production, effected in the power of The Good, contains
goodness; it is good, itself, since it is constituted by these
things of good; it is Good made diverse. It might be likened to a
living sphere teeming with variety, to a globe of faces radiant
with faces all living, to a unity of souls, all the pure souls,
not faulty but the perfect, with Intellect enthroned over all so
that the place entire glows with Intellectual splendour.
But this would be to see it from without, one thing seeing
another; the true way is to become Intellectual-Principle and be,
our very selves, what we are to see.
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